Selling your votes will make you lose authority to question govt over maladministration

 

By Okechukwu Onuegbu 

The Governorship candidate of Action Alliance (AA), Ozo Ozo Japhet Ezechukwu Nweke, has appealed to voters to shun monetary inducements from electorate on November 8 poll, noting that engaging on such could affect the pace of works in their communities. 

Nweke, who stated this in an interview, also warned that vote buying could make the masses lose moral confidence and authority to demand for good governance from the corrupt leaders, who according to him, would love to recover their expenses after election.

He, however, blamed the politicians, candidates, political parties and voters for the vote selling and buying and urged them to have a rethink so as to build a greater Nigeria. 

‎"INEC is not the main actor in this vote buying issue. It is the party and candidate representatives and those backing them that are involved. The people accepting the monies for their votes are also to be blamed because it is a two-way thing. I think there is a lot of work to be done in this regard by all the political players in the exercise. 

"There is need for serious enlightenment programmes to make our people understand the need to shun vote buying at all levels. If you sell your vote, where do you think the people buying this vote will take money to recover what they have spent? It is from the public fund, the public treasury. And when you sell your vote, you won’t have the moral authority to question why that infrastructure that your community needed so much was not fixed. 

"It is for us to sensitize our people on the disadvantages that comes with selling their votes. The people who are buying and those selling are complicit. We need good governance in Anambra state. What we are seeing is a situation where the people are driven to hunger and in the next dispensation, use the money to buy them again and the cycle continues. We have to shun vote buying at all level with all our might," he added.